Posts Tagged‘parents’

What Makes a Great Board Game? The most important part of selecting a good board game: Know your audience. When choosing a game you need to know who will be playing. A great game or six year olds may be incredibly boring for a group of junior higher. Also, simply being someone’s “favorite game ever” isn’t enough. Brain Food Think of great board games like food for your brain: When choosing real food, there is no single dish that everyone will like. Tastes differ even among the most experienced eaters. Same with games. Two veteran board gamers may like completely…

Finding a Great Book It can be tough to choose a great book. Do we look at the cover? Go off what our friends like? What if we simply hate reading? Learning how to choose books that engage us and challenge is us more than just what we do with our free time. It’s part of growing up and learning who we are. “But I Hate Reading” As a junior high English teacher I run into this all the time: I walk into the library with my class, introduce a genre and set the students loose to find something great.…

DOOM is Not Worth The Journey DOOM (2016) is part first-person shooter, part survival-horror. You play as a space marine stranded on Mars. A portal has been opened to hell and you are the only one who can stop it. The game’s tagline is “Fight like hell”. I’ve said elsewhere that DOOM is a one-trick pony. The goal is to kill a variety of demons and purge the evil from this reality. Of course, this can only be done through incredibly intense and graphic violence. The Verdict: Skip It Parent Approved Hero: 2/10 Your hero fights for what he believes is good.…

The Halo Effect First Person Shooters (FPS) are controversial. I’ve talked about how parents fear them and given a crash course introduction to First Person Shooters. Now I want to take you into the mind of an FPS gamer and what I call the Halo Effect. A Mind on Halo When Halo came out fifteen years ago it was mind-blowing. It had an incredible hero, combat that left you jittery it was so exciting, and graphics that were cutting-edge. Master Chief is a perfect spot to start when we look at how an FPS can be engaging. I’m going old school…

An Itchy Trigger Finger There are plenty of reasons to have concern regarding First Person Shooters (FPS). As I wrote in Parents fear First Person Shooters, these games often have fast-paced, immersive violence with plenty of content that should be concerning to an engaged parent. Yet is it fair to just write them off completely? Is there any redeeming value in this genre? First Person Shooters as Action Movies FPS are one of the most-played game genres because of their ability to draw a wide audience. If we were to compare video games to movies, great FPS games would be like…